PRICE, LUCIE CLIFT

PRICE, LUCIE CLIFT (1900–1983). Lucie Clift Price, historian and genealogist, the first of William H. and Ellen (Dunn) Clift's two children, was born in Davis, Oklahoma Territory, on August 27, 1900. When her mother died seven years later, she was sent to Austin, Texas, to live with her maternal grandparents. She graduated from high school there. In 1918 she attended Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Virginia, but transferred to the University of Texas in Austin a year later. She earned a B.A. in social studies and history from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1922. She married Pinckney B. Price, a highway engineer, on June 2, 1923, in Sulphur Springs, Texas. They lived in a succession of Texas towns where Price had assignments. The couple had two sons and a daughter.

The Prices were divorced in 1940, and Lucie Price returned to Austin with her children. She worked for twenty years in state government, mostly as a bond clerk in the office of the state comptroller of public accounts, before remarrying Price in 1963. They lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, till Price died in 1965. Again, Lucie moved to Austin.

In the 1970s she began full-time research in history and genealogy, an earlier avocational interest. She produced several publications on her family and her husband's family, among them Monuments of the Past: Letters of Maggie Dunn and William Henry Clift (1976). Working for a British writer, she also conducted extensive research on the nineteenth-century serial murderer William P. Longley. Of broader interest was her compilation of Travis County, Texas, Marriages, 1840–1882 (1973). She contributed to the 1973 History of Lee County, Texas and the 1976 supplement to the Handbook of Texas. Lucie Price died in Austin on September 9, 1983, and was buried in Austin Memorial Park.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Lucie C. Price Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.